Blogs

When it comes to IPM success, answers come from beyond the data

By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director, Product and Digital Marketing –

In most cases, data without context isn’t very helpful. All the data in the world doesn’t tell a story unless you know how to read it correctly, and even if you happen to have that expertise, analysis takes time. When it comes to diagnosing problem areas of your IT infrastructure – and preventing serious performance issues or even outages – time is a luxury you can’t afford. When you implement an infrastructure performance management (IPM) platform, three sets of analytics are consistently delivered to your team for rapid decision-making. The following scenarios outline the benefit of applied analytics:

Scenario One: You’re anticipating a traffic spike or burst, but you don’t want to invest in more space for temporary use.

Your IPM platform should be able to assess system balance by measuring traffic in all areas of your infrastructure environment. In the case of increased traffic or temporary clusters, a system balance report alerts your team to imbalanced infrastructures and identifies potential failure points. A balance report also alerts you to any changes in the balance/imbalance setting. One other consideration: reports that outline the state of your entire environment should be available to your team in a matter of seconds.

Scenario Two: Your team is used to alarm storms and has started to tune them out, but you’re still having performance issues.

Endless alarms, or as we refer to them, alarm storms, are not only obnoxious, they’re fairly useless. A better approach is using case-based alarms that categorize the alarms and rank each incident by relevance and priority, then deliver the entire case history to your team for review. This way of addressing performance alerts gives your team a view into the entire history of the events occurring in the environment, allowing for quick discovery into the root cause of a problem.

Scenario Three: A host in your environment is unable to handle the level of traffic for which it was historically capable.

When you’re seeing noticeable performance changes in your environment, it’s important to compare a source trend with the performance of the infrastructure to identify potential causes of events, as well as which other entities in the overall IT environment are affected. Your IPM platform should provide a quick and accurate way to narrow down probable sources, giving your team culprits on which to focus problem-solving time and energy.

No matter the scenario, applied analytics that are built into your performance monitoring platform save time and money, allowing you to focus on mission-critical tasks rather than troubleshooting and problem-solving. Why continue guessing the root causes when you can see the answers in seconds?